Mike Parker: Living in a different world
On Saturday, Oct. 7, Irene Parker, my mom, celebrated her 95th birthday. As she approaches the century mark, I think about how different the world is today than it was when she was born in 1928.
Irene Parker
Mom grew up on a farm in Monroe County, WV. As my brother John and I were growing up, we visited her parents only a few times. The first time I ever used an outhouse was at my maternal grandparents’ home.
The first time I had to fetch water from a spring was also when I visited them. I would walk to the spring with two buckets and carefully jog back to the house after I filled the buckets. It was the only running water my grandparents ever had. Come to think of it, that may have been the last time I jogged.
Mom told me she loved school and rarely missed a day despite the fact that she had to walk with other children several miles through fields and brush to arrive at Wickline School. Wickline was a one-room school house that had grades one through eight taught by one teacher.
She brought her lunch from home, and the students all drank from the same bucket and used the same dipper. A pot-bellied stove heated the schoolroom where the scholars toiled away at their lessons, the older students often serving as mentors and tutors for the younger ones.
While I was a product of the “Baby Boom” generation, those born between 1945 and 1965, my mother was part of the “Silent Generation,” those born from 1928 through 1944. They were children who lived through the Great Depression and World War II.
The “Silent” label refers to their image as conformist and civic-minded. Time Magazine coined the term for them in 1951. My mother was born one year and roughly one month before the Great Depression began.
Mom was born the year that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the dawn of the age of antibiotics. When she was born, no effective treatments existed for pneumonia, gonorrhea, and rheumatic fever.
Although the Wright Brothers achieved the first heavier-than-air flight in 1903, my mother was born just one year Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. The jet engine was not developed until 1952 – two years after I was born.
When Mom was growing up, telephones were a rarity. Although the invention of the telephone dates from 1876, the infrastructure was not in place to make telephones available in any general sense. The first rotary dial telephone was developed less than a year before my mother was born.
Televisions were unknown, computers were the size of a library and could not do what today’s pocket calculator can do, and mobile phones were not even imagined. I remember visiting my grandparents in the West Virginia mountains. They had just gotten electric service. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling to provide light to the living room. Grandma still cooked on a wood stove, we still used an outhouse, and when I was at their home, I provided “running water” for drinking.
As part of the “Silent Generation,” Mom was raised with a work ethic far beyond what most people have today. As the oldest girl, she was tasked with doing most of the cooking and tending her younger sisters and brother. She also helped with the family garden, and she fed the cows, pigs, and chickens that my grandparents raised for milk, eggs, and meat.
When my brother and I were small, she was a stay-at-home mom. When Dad’s health began to decline as his asbestosis complicated by emphysema worsened – and John was in middle school and I was in high school, Mom took a job outside her home.
She did not draw her social security until age 65 because she wanted to continue working. She worked part-time at a hospital until she was 80. She only stopped after she hurt her back trying to wrangle some laundry.
Every time she has an issue with her cell phone, she says: “Well, I wasn’t born in this electronic age.” She could equally say she was not born in the jet age, the space age, the television age, and the modern medical age.
One time, she discovered a small error that her bank had made in calculating one of her accounts. She called to resolve the matter.
“Are you an accountant?” the bank employee asked her.
“No,” she said. “I went to a one-room school where they taught us to do basic math.”
The “Silence Generation” can also display a good deal of spunk.
Happy Birthday, Mom!
Mike Parker is a columnist for the Neuse News. You can reach him at mparker16@gmail.com.
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